The Tim Ferriss Effect: Lessons From My Successful Book Launch

If you had a book coming out, and you were considering how to get people excited to buy it, read it, and talk about it, which would be most valuable to you:

1) a 3-minute segment about your book (which is long by TV news standards), including a close-up shot of the cover, on primetime CNN. . .

2) a 1,000 word piece you wrote on a topic related to your book, published in the Sunday opinion section of America’s newspaper of record, the New York Times, which reaches the #6 most emailed piece on NYTimes.com within a day. . .

3) a guest post you wrote, published on the blog of one lone dude in SF obsessed with fat loss, female orgasms, and lifting Russian kettle bells?

If your goal was to cause a lightning storm of book sales, you should pick #3. I know—I did all three.

Today, I want to write about something I’d like to call the “Tim Ferriss Effect.” It’s not exclusive to Tim Ferriss, but he is I believe the marquee example of a major shift that has happened in the last 5 years within the world of book promotion.

Here’s the basic idea:

When trying to promote a book, the main place you want coverage is on a popular single-author blog or site related to your topic.

The most pertinent words in that previous sentence, aside from “popular,” are “single-author.” No, not as in romantically unattached (Tim has a girlfriend now, and I know who she is, but I’m not telling!)

What I mean is, a blog—or other online audience such as an email newsletter—centered around one person who has major influence over a large, loyal audience.

In previous times, before the Internet, this was called the Oprah Effect. And don’t get me wrong, I’d still leap at the opportunity to share my message on cable with arguably the most persuasive person who ever walked the planet. (Producers—you can reach me via my website!)

But as more of our attention (and our book buying) shifts online, its only natural that the mantle Oprah held for a quarter of a century in introducing readers to new books, shifts to a digital native.

And in my opinion, the digital native who has taken up that mantle in the book world, is Tim Ferriss.

I had the fortune of being introduced to Mr. Ferriss well before his storied first book came out. Our mutual friend Doug Price introduced him to me as “this crazy dude you need to know.”

For many years, our relationship consisted primarily of him emailing me from various places he was traveling, and asking me to send him digital music, as he knew I was a connoisseur of Cuban salsa, which he was starting to get into. I knew him as a proprietor of a sports nutrition business, with a penchant for travel and a rather crazy book idea that had been rejected by major publishers 20+ times.

Tim and I developed a friendship, and over the years, I watched him transform himself from Tim Ferriss to Tim Ferriss: the Silicon Valley guru for whom—it seems—everything he touches turns to gold.

Fast forward many years to my recent book launch for The Education of Millionaires. This was the most important moment of my professional life. I had published one book before, which I was proud of, but this was my first career-defining book: a hardcover release, on two topics of current national discussion (career development, in the middle of a nasty economic downturn, and higher education, in the middle of a mounting debate over the value and cost of higher ed.)

I was scrambling to do everything I possibly could to get the word out about this book. I had no idea what I was doing—I had never done a national hardcover book launch before. A lot was riding on this for me.

I tried everything. I basically made the launch up as I went. I released the Introduction and Chapter 1 of my book to my (then exceedingly tiny) email list and Twitter following, hoping that would “go viral.” (It didn’t.)

I did interviews with various radio shows and even some national business websites. I’d do those interviews again—but I didn’t notice a huge spike in Amazon sales after any of these.

(By the way, my main metric in all of this story is Amazon rank, because that is the primary real-time gauge of sales available to authors, allowing you as an author to see the hour-by-hour impact of each specific piece of publicity that gets released. You’ll only ever truly understand this sentiment below, which I posted on my Facebook, until you’ve done your own book launch.)

Before launch day, I did teleseminar interviews with several of my friends who had email lists. I received an enthusiastic response from their audience, for which I was extremely grateful, and I would welcome the opportunity again—but in general their audience wasn’t of the size that would move the needle significantly on Amazon rankings.

By September 28th, 2011, the eve of my book launch (when I posted that Facebook comment), after weeks and weeks of promotion along these lines, my Amazon ranking was up to this:

Pretty darn good. But not earth-shattering.

Then, the next day, around 3:30 PM eastern on official launch day, Tim Ferriss logged onto his WordPress control panel, and pressed “Publish” on an 8,000-word guest post I had worked on over the previous several weeks, for his blog.

The post opened with Tim briefly explaining how he knew me, endorsing me as a person, and describing the book (with a link to my book.) It then went directly into my guest post– there was not even an explicit call to action to buy my book or even any positive statements about my book.

An hour later, this:

I was astonished. To see something with my name attached to it, selling on Amazon at a rank in two digits.

Here was another a fun screen-shot from that day:

I beat Tim (often called the Dale Carnegie of the digital age) and Mr. Carnegie himself, for a few days, thanks largely to Tim.

Now, I know, it wasn’t a New York Times bestseller. It wan’t #1 on Amazon. It wasn’t even Top 10 on Amazon.

But also I know a lot of authors who would die to reach #45 on Amazon on launch day. (Including me.)

For the next two months, I tried to day everything and anything to regain the Amazon ranking crack-high that that guest post gave me (unlike crack, the high lasted for weeks, as I stayed in the Top 100 for the next few weeks.)

Never got it back though.

I did all kinds of press in the subsequent weeks after Tim’s post. (If you want to, you can see some samples here.) I’m proud of this press, I’m grateful for the outlets for giving me the opportunity, and I would welcome the opportunity again. No complaints there.

But even the big opportunities that came my way didn’t ever have the effect on my book promotion that that one post on Tim’s blog did.

I had the good fortune of being able to write an opinion piece for the New York Times, related to my book. Now, the editors of the op-ed page of the New York Times don’t give a damn what effect their editorial choices have on an author’s book sales, nor should they. They’re there to provoke national discussion on important topics, and I believe the piece I wrote (with their very helpful editorial suggestions) did exactly that.

But no author in the world is going to avoid at least hoping that coverage in the nation’s newspaper of record might also unleash a torrent of buyers, landing him on that paper’s famed bestsellers list.

The op-ed reached the #6 on their “Most Emailed” ranking on their site. There were two or three days when it seemed I could not log onto Facebook or Twitter without seeing a river or retweets or Facebook shares of my piece.

I thought, with my piece getting to #6 on the “Most Emailed” list, and the s***-storm of social media action the piece was getting, there was no way this thing wasn’t going to hit bestseller list.

But instead:

That was the highest the book ever reached in the days after the New York Times piece and the crazy wild storm of social media sharing it received (up in rank from #1,301 the day before the Times piece went live.)

Similar pattern: A week later, I was on primetime CNN—OutFront with Erin Burnett—talking about my Times piece and my book. That’s a slot any author in the world (including me) would covet, and I’d leap at the opportunity again.

Yet even primetime TV coverage didn’t afford me the break into that under-100 Amazon-ranking I was so jonesing to re-experience:

Nothing to sneeze at—but I still wasn’t able to break under 100 again. Nothing, it seemed—not even major mainstream national media and a social media feeding-frenzy–could match that Amazon-ranking high that a single piece on Tim’s blog afforded me.

What was going on here? Why did one piece on a single blog work such wonders in comparison to major national media?

Post Your Comment

Post Your Reply

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.

Comments

In a word, wow. This post really resonates with me, as I have gone the traditional PR route for my fourth book. Yes, I’ve done posts on HuffPo, been written up in Forbes, and have some other high-profile stuff in the hopper. Yet, none of these channels has moved books.

Michael: Great article and some excellent tips. I like your point about how touching a large but relatively smaller group of passionate people is better than reaching a larger group of dispassionate ones. However, I don’t think that is the ONLY (or perhaps even the MAIN reason) why you had much greater success with the exposure given to you by Tim vs that offered by the mass media.

There is also an ‘immediacy’ and ‘convenience’ effect that is so powerful with web exposure. Think about it. It is so much easier for someone to go to Amazon to purchase your book when they read about it in a blog or forum (after all, it is just a click away) than it is when they are exposed to it via a TV or magazine. As a professional marketer, I learned a long time ago that the key to success is to make it fast and easy for someone to buy your product once they become aware of it. Food for thought!

“If you take a print magazine with a million person circulation, and a blog with a devout readership of 1 million, for the purpose of selling anything that can be sold online, the blog is infinitely more powerful, because it’s only a click away. The transition from interest to purchase is one click, whereas if someone sees something on Good Morning America, as wide as its reach may be, they need to write that down, and/or capture it in a device and then go online, search for it and purchase it.”

This is the most interesting book marketing piece I’ve ever seen. Having read Tim Ferris’s books and being astounded at the passion of his audience, I am convinced that you are right. Ferris’s thinking and writing is counter-culture, somewhat “radical” in concept and very enticing in its message. You inspire. Think I’ll write a book and see if your suggestions work!

I was about to start wondering why you don’t mention what seems to be the obvious, but then Tim Ferriss mentions it: the fact that a (passionate) blog reader is just a click away from the product while the TV viewers will have forgotten about your product by the time the show they are watching is over.

Tim is an inspiration, to many, and in my opinion the greatest currently living (self) marketing mastermind.

On a side not: for all 4 Hour Workweek fans, visit http://4hwwsuccess.com for inspiring 4 Hour Workweek Success Stories.

Great article. I don’t have the book yet but I’ve caught some of your content have enjoyed and connected/related with it a lot. This article really highlights how the internet has changed everything forever. i.e. Everyone has the opportunity to put up a blog and build a community of loyal followers that was only previously possible with amazing amounts of traditional media exposure. That’s not to say its easy but the opportunity is there for everyone with a computer and an internet connection. Getting past the gatekeepers of TV is no longer necessary.

I’ve read these recommendations before and heard them from a number of places, but this is the most concrete demonstration of it. Thanks for your specific, personal details, Michael – that made all the difference between me reading this again, and finally getting it.

This is exactly what SOPA is for. To get people back to the mainstream network giants that send the same content out to everyone regardless of interests. Blogs and Google work too well in terms of promotion. Mickey Mouse doesn’t get paid this way. And Micky Mouse is very angry when he doesn’t get paid.

This is all nice and good but let’s face it, the very title of your post “The Tim Ferriss Effect” indicates that is was the direct intervention of someone with star power to tapping into their followers that lead to you’re books success. How many others out there have access to Tim Ferriss? Not much I’d imagine and like you yourself pointed out, unless you were his friend, the majority of unknowns out there would probably be rejected. This “advice” is a fluff piece for the rich and well connected and does nothing to truly advise the common man and first time authors.

Loved, loved, loved! this article! It was forwarded to me by a friend whom, as we both are, are trying to market our businesses and books and everything you write about in this article is 100% true and accurate.

One a side funny note, I completely agree about the Amazon ranking. I do the daily check on the rank for my book as well. One friend asked me what do I consider to be a good ranking…my answer … if it was better than yesterday!

With that said, building relationships within in your industry is key and your article points that out very well. I have been on NBC, ABC, Bloomberg, MSN Money and while I have received excellent traffic from all of those sources, none have outdone a couple of blogs related to my business. While I can’t say I have sold millions of books or millions of products my business sells, I have done well, when those bloggers, that have a passionate following, take the time to talk about me, who I am and what I sell, and do so on a personal level.

This is such a great article. I am a good example of how well this works. About a year before my book came out, I met bestselling author, J.A. Jance. I sent her a quick email afterward to thank her, and tell her I’d taken her advice. Then when I got a book deal, I wrote again to tell her that her advice had lead to a book contract and she reciprocated with more good advice. For me, it was all about thankfulness.

Through email we wrote back and forth and she gave me advice along the road to publication. I am a debut author and had no idea what I was doing. My memoir came out on 11/1/11 and she read it! Well, she sent an email to her entire email list about my book, something she’d never done before. She believed in, Breaking the Code, and became a champion for it. My sales numbers went up and continue to go up. I recently learned that she uses me as an example in her author presentations, which explains my constant surges in sales. She tells people to buy my book. My Amazon ranking went up and we are often paired together as items bought together. This has nothing to do with how much money you have or whether you have the right connections. It’s about being grateful and recognizing when someone has done something positive for you (advice, in this case). And by the way, a blurb written by J.A. will appear on the back of the 2nd edition of my book!

Additionally, I began cultivating online relationships when I first started writing my memoir almost 10 years ago. Those connections continue to spread the word about my book, in more ways than I can count.

I love this article. It put words and an explanation to what I “just happened” to experience along the way. Thank you for writing it! I guess as it turns out, what just felt right/good to do as a human being, ended up being the right thing to do for book marketing. Couldn’t get better than that! ~Karen Fisher-Alaniz

This is an eye-opening and inspiring message! Thank you, Mr. Ellsberg! I’m an indie writer about to release my debut novel and one of my biggest hurdles is trying to figure out how to market my work to the right audience. You’ve given me A LOT to think about, and you’ve just gained a fan. I look forward to reading many more of your insightful posts!

This is SO helpful. My book on chills and thrills in tribal Thailand will be out this fall, and I’d like to have it mentioned by Benny Hinn and Joyce Meyer. I”ve seen both of them in Thailand and I know they believe God is alive and interfacing with people. I haven’t known how to go about establishing contact. Now I know how to begin a relationship with them. Thanks, Michael Ellsberg. You’re awesome!

Underlying this article is a tacit assumption; that it is largely the author who has the onus of ensuring the success of his book. Book Publishers are no longer adding much value either from their physical distribution, or from the imputed reputation of their brand and imprint. So once their marketing efforts (like book tours and television appearances) start to wane against the built-in audiences of the authors–well then that is the beginning of the end for the book publishing industry (and self publishing will dominate). As goes the book business, so will the article/magazine industry — we have entered the era of author driven distribution (which is at the heart of what Forbes is calling entrepreneurial journalism.)

Brilliant article on the Tim Ferriss Effect Michael. As a speaker, author and consultant teaching women the power of digital marketing and digital self publishing, I found this article to be right on the money.

Outside of Amazon’s Lending Library [where I had 12,000 downloads in 3 days] the biggest mover of my book Your Millionaire Attitude was blog interviews and personal reviews from women with my direct target market that I had a personal relationship with.

Being mentored by Brendon Burchard I have used many of his marketing strategies also. When it comes to book marketing I would have to say Tim Ferriss and Brendon Burchard are second to none. Thank you for sharing this insightful blogpost. Cheers Pam Brossman, CEO SheExperts.com